Spectacular

It is the end of the show. Fake blood has been splattered everywhere. The body count is high. The final victim drops to the floor writhing in agony.

The body's twitches subside, and the survivors speak the epilogue. As you watch them, you notice that the exertions of dying are still taking their toll on the actor. The corpse is breathing heavily, and any minute now the dead will rise and take their bow at the end of the show. Tomorrow night they will live, die and rise again.

We have all been there, and now Forced Entertainment take us there again in a show whose name is a finely honed joke, but also a challenge to the audience. There is absolutely nothing spectacular about Spectacular, which features a paunchy man in a skeleton suit on an empty stage describing a performance that is not taking place, and a woman who keeps on interrupting him and seizing the spotlight to perform a series of melodramatic death scenes that rupture the unspectacular spectacle.

Both these performers are making a spectacle of themselves, but alone they cannot smother the absence that fills the stage, the emptiness where the man in the skeleton costume tells us that there should be dancers wearing pink ostrich feathers and a band playing an upbeat ragtime number and a warm-up man cracking jokes.

They can all be seen, but only if - like that glorious moment in Peter Pan when we have to save Tinkerbell - the audience really believes. There are three of us in this theatrical marriage, and we all have to work pretty hard to keep it going.

There is no such thing as an empty space. All spaces, all stages come with their own ghosts. We bring our own ghosts with us when we step inside the theatre. Funny, bleak and often ridiculous, always aware of its own absurd pantomimic proclivities, Spectacular invites us to raise spectres, to make it real even though we know what we are witnessing is a cosy illusion that starts decomposing as soon as we step outside the theatre. In doing so, it raises the possibility that we are all just actors in our own lives, stranded in an empty theatre, desperately sustaining our own pretence until that final moment when the lights dim for the last time and we make our final bow.